1372 Obama - Stimulus definition

from where Nations Go to Die by Mark Steyn on National Review Online

“Stimulus” comes from the verb stimulare, which is Latin for “transfer massive sums of money from what remains of the dynamic sector of the economy to the special interests of the Democratic party.” No, hang on, my mistake. Stimulare means “to goad.” And, on that front, the Democrats are doing an excellent job. They’ve managed to goad 58 percent of the American people into opposing the “stimulus” package. They’ve managed to goad all 177 Republicans in the House into unpacking their mothballed cojones and voting against the bill. And they’ve managed to goad the rest of the world into ending the Obama honeymoon in nothing flat. Headline from the London Daily Telegraph: “US-EU Trade War Looms As Barack Obama Bill Urges ‘Buy American.’ ”

That would be the provision in the Senate bill prohibiting any foreign-made goods from being used in “stimulus” projects. So, if you own a rubber plantation in Malaysia and you’re hoping for a piece of Nancy Pelosi’s condom action, forget it. The EU trade commissioner is outraged at the swaggering cowboy Obama shooting from the hip and unilaterally banning European goods from American soil. But so are American companies such as General Electric. Bill Lane, an executive honcho with Caterpillar (the tenth biggest U.S. investor in the United Kingdom), says, “We are students of history. A major reason a very deep recession turned into the Great Depression was the fact that countries turned inward.” Ah, yes. The Buy American Act of 1933. How’d that work out?